Squaring TRP's Luddite Essay with His Sloth Essay

[ish mailian]

Pynchon is "fully modern" in the sense that Marshall Berman describes
the modern condition: "to be fully modern is to be anti-modern."

On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 6:14 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see no 'evolution' of his thinking that is a distinction with a
> difference. All of a piece, lo those decades.
>
> On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 3:38 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Typed my way through a brief attempt to understand or at least meditate on
>> these two essays in tandem upon a revisit of them yesterday...
>>
>> Maybe not worth your time, but if anybody's interested in reacting or
>> offering any insight, I imagine it'll be worth mine. The maybe-finite
>> resource of my time, that is.
>>
>>
>> Luddite essay here:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
>>
>> Sloth here:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-sloth.html
>>
>> Luddite essay is '84. Sloth '93.
>>
>> End of the Luddite essay:
>>
>> If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come
>> - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in
>> artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.
>> It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
>> devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something
>> for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so
>> long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold,
>> from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other
>> observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites
>> and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:
>>
>> As the Liberty lads o'er the sea
>> Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
>> So we, boys, we
>> Will die fighting, or live free,
>> And down with all kings but King Ludd!
>>
>>
>> The last two paragraphs of the Sloth essay:
>>
>> Unless the state of our souls becomes once more a subject of serious
>> concern, there is little question that Sloth will continue to evolve away
>> from its origins in the long-ago age of faith and miracle, when daily life
>> really was the Holy Ghost visibly at work and time was a story, with a
>> beginning, middle and end. Belief was intense, engagement deep and fatal.
>> The Christian God was near. Felt. Sloth -- defiant sorrow in the face of
>> God's good intentions -- was a deadly sin.
>>
>> Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems
>> increasingly to define us -- technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow,
>> despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in
>> virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed in its idle, disposable
>> fantasies, even those about superheroes of Sloth back in Sloth's good old
>> days, full of leisurely but lethal misadventures with the ruthless villains
>> of the Acedia Squad.
>>
>>
>> Does this seem like an evolution in his thinking from the Luddite essay?
>>
>> He's so--even in his nonfic--exploratory, proceeding by a kind of
>> thinking-at-speed logic, but also ambulatory, wandering, without apparent
>> destination, toying with different ideas, tones...
>>
>> So while I'm both (for better or worse, not really purposely but
>> inevitably) always studying Pynchon for lessons in how to live and think,
>> I'm also always hesitant to decisively identify too much explicit opinion or
>> ideology.
>>
>> But I usually come out of the Luddite essay--or at least look back on
>> it--feeling like he's kind of pro-Luddism, or at least entangling Luddism
>> with certain lineages and inclinations that he might either note with some
>> affection or even identify with. Basically it feels like it has some note of
>> endorsement to it.
>>
>> The sloth essay I usually look back on with the idea that he's offering a
>> kind of defense/endorsement of sloth, a kind of passive resistance to
>> capitalistic/only-forward time, to the treatment of time as a finite and
>> exploitable resource. But actually his movement through it is complicated.
>> It is sometimes the way I remember it. But then it's also other things. He
>> initially frames it as one of Aquinas's seven deadlies. Aquinas calls it
>> acedia. Pynchon seems to formulate his idea of it primarily from this
>> vantage point.
>>
>> Here are the different mentions of acedia in the essay.
>>
>> 1) "Acedia" in Latin means sorrow, deliberately self-directed, turned away
>> from God, a loss of spiritual determination that then feeds back on in to
>> the process, soon enough producing what are currently known as guilt and
>> depression, eventually pushing us to where we will do anything, in the way
>> of venial sin and bad judgment, to avoid the discomfort.
>>
>> 2) Between Franklin's hectic aphorist, Poor Richard, and Melville's doomed
>> scrivener, Bartleby, lies about a century of early America, consolidating
>> itself as a Christian capitalist state, even as acedia was in the last
>> stages of its shift over from a spiritual to a secular condition.
>>
>> 3) BY the time of "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" (1853),
>> acedia had lost the last of its religious reverberations and was now an
>> offense against the economy. Right in the heart of robber-baron capitalism,
>> the title character develops what proves to be terminal acedia.
>>
>> 4) In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political,
>> a failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the
>> rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and
>> 30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the
>> Reagan-Bush years are not far behind. Fiction and nonfiction alike are full
>> of characters who fail to do what they should because of the effort
>> involved. How can we not recognize our world? Occasions for choosing good
>> present themselves in public and private for us every day, and we pass them
>> by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday moral life. Though it has never
>> lost its deepest notes of mortal anxiety, it never gets as painful as
>> outright despair, or as real, for it is despair bought at a discount price,
>> a deliberate turning against faith in anything because of the inconvenience
>> faith presents to the pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest.
>>
>> 5) Is Sloth once more about to be, somehow, transcended? Another
>> possibility of course is that we have not passed beyond acedia at all, but
>> that it has only retreated from its long-familiar venue, television, and is
>> seeking other, more shadowy environments -- who knows? computer games, cult
>> religions, obscure trading floors in faraway cities -- ready to pop up again
>> in some new form to offer us cosmic despair on the cheap.
>>
>> And 6) happens in the last paragraph I pasted above. I guess looking at it
>> now it doesn't necessarily seem like TRP's really abandoning or shifting his
>> identification with/endorsement of/sympathy for Luddism. Maybe he's even
>> saying, as we're increasingly defined by technology, Luddism becomes a more
>> logical, potent, holy, common(?), effective(??) kind of sloth than ever
>> before.
>>
>> Really maybe he's saying sloth was once--in the Age of Miracles--an
>> inhibition to a vividly felt/engaged experience of the world, but now, in a
>> less holy world, sloth isn't despairingly turning away from the holy but
>> from the unholy/unholiness.
>>
>> So by a weird kind of divergent and antagonstic evolution, sloth gets
>> decoupled from its "acedia" origins and becomes a resistance to some old
>> ghost-half of itself. Despair against despair. A face and its mirror image
>> turning away from each other.
>>
>> But was it that original coupling of sloth and acedia itself--the turning
>> away from the holy--that led out of the Age of Miracles? Or maybe as Aquinas
>> would have it, it was 1/7 of the story.
>>
>>
>>
>> Do you see much movement in TRP's thinking over the 9-yr publication gap
>> between these two things?
>
>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l